Soundtrack Saturday

Iggy Pop plays at Manchester's Victoria Warehouse tonight and I'm going to be there. Iggy feels like the last man standing in a way. He hasn't played in Manchester for years and at 78 years old I can't imagine there'll be too many opportunities to see him on home turf again. Although it wouldn't surprise me if Iggy lived to be 100 and carried on performing with his shirt off for another two decades. 

Two weeks ago the Soundtrack Saturday featured Iggy's title song to the 1984 Alex Cox film Repo Man. Iggy got a massive boost in the 90s when his songs were included on the soundtrack to Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Included seems a bit reductionist- it's fair to say that the film, its publicity and its opening scene would be nowhere near as memorable as they were without this song bursting out of the cinema speakers as a shoplifting Ewan McGregor attempt to outrun security guards and ends up almost splayed across the bonnet of a car, laughing at the poor driver...

Lust For Life

Lust For Life was the title song from Iggy's 1977 second solo album, recorded at Hansa in West Berlin with David Bowie in the producer's seat. The band were Iggy's touring line up- Ricky Gardiner on guitar and Tony and Hunt Sales on bass and drums. Ricky Gardiner came up the famous guitar riff, based on the Morse code  opening to the US Armed Forces Network news programme and written on a ukulele. The guitars are great but its the drums which are first out of the traps, the loudest, most perfectly recorded drums. But there's no escaping the riff, everything just has to fall into line and follow. 

On top of this, essentially punk crossed with a sped up Motown backbeat, Iggy songs and sneers, at the top of his game, lines about Johnny Yen, liqour and rugs, hypnotising chickens, flesh machines and GTOs fired off, always coming back to the hilariously brilliant, 'well I'm just a modern guy... I got a lust for life'. Jon Savage (I think) once wrote that in just four years, from Raw Power to Lust For Life, Iggy went from Death Trip to Lust For Life and what a strange trip it was. 

Trainspotting also featured Iggy's song Nightclubbing, a genuine solo Iggy Pop classic, from Iggy's solo debut The Idiot (also recorded with Bowie but at Chateau d'Herouville, France). Bowie and Iggy had both left the USA to kick addictions and ended up in Europe making records that soaked up the new sounds of West German rock and electronics. Nightclubbing has Bowie on keys and a very mechanistic drum machine, a weird, dislocated electronic pulse, cocaine numbness and Iggy intoning his lyric about what it was like hanging out with Bowie every night, seeing people, 'brand new people', and doing 'brand new dances like the nuclear bomb'. Bowie wanted to replace the drum machine with 'proper' drums but Iggy stuck his ground, correctly, seeing that the drum machine gives the song its blank, lurching edge.

Nightclubbing

Iggy wrote the words in ten minutes in the studio and later said Nightclubbing was about "about the incredible coldness and deathly feeling you have after you've done something like that and how much you enjoy it. It could be Los Angeles or Paris or New York or anywhere, really." In Trainspotting the song soundtracks a scene involving shooting up in a desolate Edinburgh apartment and ends with the death of a baby. 

The Trainspotting soundtrack is a superb 90s soundtrack. It turned Born Slippy into a massive hit and rebirthed Lou Reed's Perfect Day. It included Brian Eno's Deep Blue Day and Pulp's Mile End and a ten minute Weatherall produced Primal Scream title track, a slow, snakey instrumental with the street sounds from an all day session outside a pub in Soho, the assembled Scream party people shouting to friends and associates from the street to a first or second floor room. 

Trainspotting

Define, Take A Minute And The Ghosts Of Dawn

Friday this week is a bumper post, new music from three artists old and new- OBOST, James Hardway and Reverb Delay, between them all showing electronic music- techno, acid, dub, house, whatever- is in good health and flourishing. 

The very young and very talented Bobby Langfield, who records as OBOST, released an album and some singles/ EPs last year and played live at The Golden Lion in March. Today sees the release of a two track EP- Define/ Redefine. Define is led by a robotic stutter and squiggle, a voice, distorted toplines and piano kicking in and out. The vocal eventually reduces to the title, just the word 'define' repeated as keyboard notes rising and falling. 

Redefine is a tougher, muckier and heavier take on the original, some serious acid techno at play, the rhythm thundering away, the sequencer caught in an endlessly addictive groove and the vocal several octaves deeper. Define/ Redefine are both available at Bandcamp.  

Half the world away in Los Angeles David Harrow has resurrected his James Hardway persona for brand new tune and an eight track EP packed with versions and some remixes courtesy of the very much in  form Rude Audio. Take A Minute appears in DnB version, a TikTok Mix, a 3Step one, the Footwork Mix and here as the House Mix where it feels like a crossover, some long lost futuristic 90s house playing in the  third decade of the 21st century, the vocals by DangerRed beamed in from the aftermath of a party. 

Rude Audio's remix reworks the tempo and the rhythm, dropping the vocal down (as OBOST did too) and adding some typically South London dub to the LA dubstep. All eight versions/ mixes/ remixes are at Bandcamp. 

Reverb Delay is Marcus Farley whose EP Horizontal Rain came out on Mighty Force last month. A new thirteen track album, The Ghosts Of Dawn, is out today, an album that is in part a tribute to Berlin, its techno and dub sounds- for Marcus, the album is about the thrill of 'chasing the dawn', the ride on public transport to the centre of the city, entry to the clubs, immersion in the dancefloors, and then the journey home. 

The Ghosts Of Dawn starts as it intends to go on- with an eight track dub techno excursion, rattling drums and gliding synths called Into The Night. As well as the music of Berlin, Detroit is very much  present as is the Birmingham techno scene much loved by Marcus, Sandwell District and Surgeon, plus the mid 90s speaker shaking sounds of Bandulu. On One Four the kick drum hammers onward while synth stabs and arpeggios dance away at the top end. 

The title track comes into the second half, a sense of calm and space, a slight lessening of the tempos and tension. Underground Overground is a nine minute wait for the train home, the night's adventures still running the mind and then Train Three brings station announcements, train noise and ambient techno chill. It's very much an album to be listened to in full, a piece and not just a collection of tracks, a journey into and through the night- you can find it at Mighty Force. 

Sabres

Tonight The Sabres Of Paradise play live at Fabric in London, the first time the band have played since a handful dates in Japan in 1995. The live band line up of Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, guitarist Phil Mossman, bassist Nick Abnett and drummer Rich Thair are one man down- Andrew Weatherall is absent for obvious reasons- but Jagz and co. have decided to revive the band, do some gigs and finish the job, put Sabres out there and then put Sabres to bed. There may/ will be some further announcements about Sabres activity to follow- in fact, I think there may be some today and then more in a few weeks. 

After the gig at Fabric Sabres fly to Australia to play at Sydney Opera House and then they return to Europe to play Primavera and Dekmantel. I'm going down to London today to see them. I missed Sabres play live back in the 90s and wasn't going to miss out twice. Also, The Flightpath Estate are partly responsible for the reformation happening. In 2023 Martin from The Flightpath Estate approached Jagz about marking the 30th anniversary of the release of Sabresonic and suggested a Q&A at The Golden Lion in Todmorden with a Jagz DJ set. Jagz was up for it and I agreed to be the host of the Q&A, asking the questions and trying to maintain a semblance of order. Jagz brought Gary along, two Sabres for the price of one and both were great fun, answered all the questions and entertained us with stories and tales of their lives and adventures with Andrew Weather al, making records in the mid- 90s. 

We had a live recording of Sabres Of Paradise playing at Manchester's Herbal Tea Party, recorded back in 1994 provided by Rob Fletcher, and in between the Q&A and Jagz's DJ set we played it through the pub's PA. Jagz stood by a speaker listening intently and said to us at one point, 'You know, we sounded pretty good back then...'. 

The live recording is at Mixcloud, Andrew on the decks for the first half hour and then Sabres playing Bubble And Slide II, Tow Truck, Theme and Smokebelch.

Bubble And Slide (Nightmares On Wax Remix)

Cogs started turning in Jagz's head and once he got agreement from the other five Sabres live players, wheels were set in motion. There have been some rehearsal footage clips on social media this week, Jagz and Gary at the keys and synths, Rich standing at the drums and percussion and Nick rocking a low slung bass guitar, Phil front and centre with his Les Paul. There are a few photos from that time of the group on stage- this one is from Sugar Sweet in Belfast...

At the Sabresonic 30th Q&A we discussed where Andrew got the name Sabres Of Paradise from. The NME at the time suggested excitedly it was a play on Sex Pistols but there are two more plausible  and possible sources. One is a 1960 novel by Lesley Blanch, a tale of pre- revolutionary Russia, cossacks and the Caucuses. The other is a 1983 Haysi Fantayzee B-side, a six minute dubby/ synth excursion by Jeremy Healy and Kate Garner (produced by Tony Visconti) with rambling, spoken word vocals. No one seemed entirely sure which  one was the source, and equally, it could be both. 

The Sabres Of Paradise

There are still a few tickets available for the Fabric gig tonight. David Holmes is playing a supporting DJ set and the place is sure to be filled with friendly faces. It's not too late... 

Glad

Saint Etienne are about to bow out after thirty five years of making records. Sarah, Bob and Pete are releasing their final album, International, in September and ahead of it put out a song last week, the irresistible, uptempo, Northern Soul on synths sounds of Glad...

Glad was co- written by Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands and has Dove Jez Goodwin on guitar but it's Saint Etienne through and through, a song celebrating taking joy in small things.

Back in February they released some remixes of Alone Together from last year's The Night album. The Hove Lawns Sunset Mix is a Balearic joy, lazy drums and summer horns. They did a vinyl release, pressing up the number that were ordered. My copy has never arrived, lost somewhere in the postal system rather annoyingly.

Endsong

The Cure's remix album, a slew of artists tackling songs from last year's Songs Of A Lost World, promises to be one of 2025's highlights. The recent Four Tet remix of Alone has now been joined by Orbital's version of Endsong, the album's final track and Robert Smith's meditation on staring into the abyss of loss, grief and memory, 'left alone with nothing at the end of every song'. 

Endsong

On Endsong (Orbital Remix) the Hartnoll brothers turn their hugely emotive techno up to eleven and take The Cure to new places. Skyscraping, beautiful, cosmic gloom.  

Monday's Long Song

I was going through one of the shelves of CDs recently and rediscovered the compilations of remixes by The Orb, double disc CD albums titled Auntie Aubrey's Excursions Beyond The Call Of Duty, a massive round up of remixes The Orb undertook in the 90s for other artists. Volume 1 came out in 1997 and took in Primal Scream, Killing Joke, Zodiac Mindwarp, Yello, Depeche Mode, Erasure, Pop Will Eat Itself and a slew of others. Volume 2 came out four years later and threw The Orb's net even wider- Wendy And Lisa, Lisa Stansfield, The KLF, Robbie chuffing Williams, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Can, The Grid, System 7, Meat Beat Manifesto and Art Of Noise among others, and this one...

Towards The Evening Star (Mandarin Cream Mix)

Eight minutes of mid 90s Orb remixing the mighty Tangerine Dream, from the when Thrash had left and Andy Hughes was working as Alex Paterson's right hand man. The familiar Orb sheen and sampled voices are there, a lovely chuggy rhythm kicking in and washes of synth shifting from left to right across the speakers. It's a blurred area with Orb remixes to know where the original artist ends and The Orb begin- there's as much Orb in this as there is Tangerine Dream. By three and a half minutes in everything's cooking nicely, ambient house with the emphasis on house, chunky drums and bass. The radio/ TV voices return during the break down and then the drums thunder back in and its all systems go for a few more minutes before everything ends with a dust storm. 

The original track came out the year before on Tangerine Dream's Goblins' Club album, the German band's twenty fourth studio album. It's not a TD album I know- my TD knowledge is limited to Zeit, Phaedra, Rubycon and Force Majuere and I feel that on the whole that's enough. Apparently The Orb's remix was unsolicited and unofficial leaving TD's Edgar Froese both furious and litigious. The remix came out as a CD single paired with the original track so it's a bit odd that Edgar seemed to know nothing about it. Record company shenanigans maybe. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Ultramarine

A few weeks ago an email arrived promising a new album from the duo Ultramarine- it is in fact a new old album, thirteen previously unheard and unreleased recordings from 1996- 7 about to be compiled as Routine and released by Blackford Hill. A single, Sunrise, came out on Friday as a taster and it's been part of my commuting playlist for the past fortnight, three and a half minutes of sunlit synths, keys and a hissy drum machine, and very nice indeed.

Ultramarine were/ are London and Essex duo Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper and back in the early 90s their fusion of ambient/ ambient house and folk was a refreshing and very English pastoral sound. Their best known song, Kingdom, saw them recruit Robert Wyatt on vocals and over the course of several albums they refined their sound and always stayed interesting- 1990's Folk, 1991's Every Man And Woman Is A Star and 1993's United Kingdoms were all essential early 90s electronic/ ambient/ folk and they've made four in the 2010s that have kept the standard high. Routine is available at Bandcamp for pre- order ahead of its release in July. Some of the track titles- Avebury, Crop Circle 5am, Runic Calibration and Astro Navigation- are pure Ultramarine. 

I thought a Sunday mix to accompany the new single was in order and revisiting their music this week has been a joy. The tracks below are all from the duo's 90s recordings and are perfect for a Sunday in May even if the weather isn't doing quite what it should be. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Ultramarine

• Kingdom (Extended Mix)
• Hymn (Kevin Ayres Version)
• The Badger (Remixed By Richard H. Kirk)
• Goldcrest
• British Summertime
• Stella
• Interstella (Stella)
• Sunrise

Kingdom came out in 1993 with Robert Wyatt on vocals, the nearest they got to a hit. Wyatt's doleful, haunting, double tracked voice singing words of Medieval suffering and protest- 'We're low, we're low, we're rabble we know, mere rabble we know' and 'We're not too low the cloth to weave/ Too low the cloth to wear'. The folky/ Medieval pipes and 90s electronic squelch sound superb together. Goldcrest was the B-side of the Kingdom 12". The album United Kingdoms followed complete Incredible String Band sample. The Badger was also on United Kingdoms, one of several tracks remixed by among others Carl Craig and Fila Brazillia, and the one here by Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk. 

Hymn is a cover of a 1974 Kevin Ayres song, and came out in 1994, the sumptuous Ultramarine electronic sound and traditional instruments- accordion, clarinet- plus the voice of David McAlmont. The version I've included here has Kevin singing and came out on a remixes EP. 

British Summertime was on 1991's Every Man And Woman Is A Star album, an ambient techno/ house classic, the folk influences seamlessly stitched in with early 90s technology, an ambient hippy/ folk crossover. The word pastoral was used a lot in reviews and the folky/ jazzy sound of the late 60s Canterbury scene, John Martyn and Rob Harper, that gentle English psychedelia, was a very strong presence on the album's dozen tracks. 

Stella and Interstella were a 1990 single recorded for Belgian Le Disques Du Crepuscule in 1989 (a Factory sister label). They are always together for me, Stella and Interstella, and separating them seems wrong. They were added to the group's first album Folk, also released by Le Disques Du Crepuscule in 1990, an album that crosses boundaries from psyche to house to Balearic and back again, breakbeats and folk. Stella bounces around, bleeps and bass and warm synth chords, the 'You and me together' sample at its heart. Interstella (Stella) in particular is a dream record, ambient house, acoustic guitar and vocal samples, a voice saying 'I can do anything' perfectly encapsulating the feel of the times, when music was infused with the sense of endless possibility. 

Sunrise is from the forthcoming Routine album, which is where this post started. 

Soundtrack Saturday

The pair of recent New Order Sunday mixes and yesterday's Fadela, a single released on Factory Records in 1987, have led me to Salvation! Directed by Beth B, Salvation! was a 1987 film, black comedy about an evangelical/ televangelism sex and blackmail scandal, starring Viggo Mortensen, Exene Cervenka (of Los Angeles punk band X) and Stephen McHattie. I've seen the film once, way back in 1988 at a film night when I was a student at Liverpool university and I honestly couldn't tell you much about it- a very of its time film I think. 

The soundtrack however is a different story. It was released on Factory's Benelux label and its sister label Le Disques De Crepuscule and featured five New Order songs, four of which only ever saw the light of day on the soundtrack until the New Order Retro box set in 2002 included Let's Go on John McCready's disc. 

Let's Go

Let's Go is very New Order in 1987, shiny and bright, sounding like it could easily have been an album track on 1986's Brotherhood, not quite a lost gem perhaps but a missing New Order song all the same. The five songs were all recorded for the film- Touched By The Hand Of God was deemed worthy of a full Factory release as a single in 1987, remixed by Arthur Baker and released as FAC 193, the follow up to True Faith which was a big hit that summer.

Touched By The Hand Of God

In the Retro box set booklet Stephen comments that Touched... was a 'land speed song- writing attempt', written for the film, a case of sit down and write a song in a day. In Substance Hooky says he arrived at the band's Cheetham Hill studio first and wrote the juddering synth bassline on his own. Bernard turned up and was impressed enough to want to turn it into a song. The way Hooky describes this suggests that gaining Bernard's approval was important in the summer of 1987. 

The other three songs are Salvation Theme, Skullcrusher and Sputnik. Skullcrusher is short, bass-led, some feedback running through it and a gnarly Sumner guitar solo, a curio in the NO back catalogue.

Skullcrusher

As well as New Order the soundtrack has songs by Arthur Baker, Cabaret Voltaire, The Hood (the musical outfit for legendary New York doorman and party promoter John Hood) and Dominique (Davalos, an actor and musician, best known for her role in Howard The Duck, a film I had entirely forgotten about until now), and Jumpin' Jesus (Baker and Stewart Kimball with actor Stephen McHattie on vocals). Of all of these Cabaret Voltaire's Jesus Saves is the keeper, a 1987 industrial synth pop moment. 

N'Sel Fik

My recent interest in things Moroccan/ North African and my longstanding love of Factory Records come together today in a post to end the week. In 1987 Factory released a record by Fadela, a 7" and 12" single (Fac 197) a song called N'Sel Fik- a fusion of synthpop and rai. It's always felt like a bit of an outlier in the Factory back catalogue (a label with enough outliers to be going on with, one which would happily release a single on a whim if one of the key movers at the label liked it enough). 

N'Sel Fik 

The version I have here is a shorter one than the Factory release, four minutes as opposed to seven one (and there was also a three minute promo version for radio stations). In 1987 Factory also put out True Faith and Touched By The Hand Of God by New Order, the NO compilation Substance, 24 Hour Party People by Happy Mondays, and a slew of singles by Miaow, ACR, The Railway Children, Kalima, Biting Tongues and Durutti Column. N'Sel Fik sounds nothing like any of these.

Fadela were a married couple, Chaba Fadela and Cheb Sahraoui. The song was one of the first rai recordings to be widely released in Europe. Factory licensed it from Parisian label Attitude who originally put it out in 1986. I've long wondered how and why it came about and with a little bit of internet sleuthing found out the following...

Mike Pickering, Hacienda DJ, Factory A&R and recording artist (Quando Quango) heard it being played in the Harem club in New York, a club run by Mark Kamins (an NY legend who helped shape the city's club culture and sound in the 70s and 80s and who played an instrumental role in launching Madonna's career). Kamins had a lot of Eastern/ Turkish/ North African influences going on at harem. He'd have Turkish musicians playing live while he spun early house records. M/A/R/R/S came down one night with a white label of Pump Up The Volume and Mark mixed the vocal of an Egyptian singer into it- M/A/R/R/S went back to London and sampled the voice for the final cut of their single.Harem became hip and Kamins shut it down a year later after New Order played there. 

If you want a much more detailed post about the story of Fadela and N'Sel Fik this blog, Hawgblawg, can fill you in. It's written by a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas who has published a book on the Palestinian Revolt of the 1930s.

Mike Pickering was so taken with N'Sel Fik he took a copy back to Manchester and told Tony Factory should license and release it with a Pickering remix. It's not an easy or especially cheap record to track down now- I have it on the Palatine box set but have never found a copy of the single on either 7" or 12". The hunt is all part of the fun though. 

Two Love

Le Volume Courbe is the musical vehicle for French born, London based musician Charlotte Marionneau. Charlotte has released two previous albums, I Killed My Best Friend in 2005 and I Wish Dee Dee Ramone Was Here With Me in 2015. Now there's a new album, Planet Ping Pong, eleven songs recorded while Charlotte was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer. The cancer diagnosis led to a burst of creativity, it became 'a vital thing' (Charlotte's words). There are some big names on the album too- Noel Gallagher plays on the single Two Love and the late Terry Hall sings a duet with Charlotte on a cover of Daniel Johnston's Mind Distorted. Two very Bagging Area adjacent names also crop up- Mat Ducasse/ Matty Skylab and Chris Rotter both appear as co- writers. 

Planet Ping Pong is out on Stereolab's Duophonic label. Stereolab's 60s experimental art- pop is a good reference point as are some Gallic singers and sounds, Serge and Jane, Brigitte, Francoise et al. There are hints of the songs of Broadcast and Syd Barrett too, some baroque pop and nods to the likes of Silver Apples. Two Love is a gem, with shuffly drums, ambient noise and a prodding bassline and Charlotte's very Gallic vocal. Noel plays piano, sounding as far from Oasis as he ever has. Primal Scream's Andrew Innes is in there too, on programming. There are samples of ping pong balls, bursts of shaker and the occasional miaow. Tres bon.

Two Silhouettes

Two Silhouettes is from South London, part of The Fearless Few Collective (Margate based electronic producers and record label). Otherwise known as Samuel Holloway, Two Silhouettes has a handful of albums behind him. The latest came out earlier this month, Flying Dream, fourteen slices of modern electronic music spanning ambient, UK garage, experimental electronica, sampledelica, bass culture and funk. It's a lot of fun, a little frazzled in places, chirpy and off kilter in others, a little hyperactive too. The tracks rattle by, some under three minutes long, nothing outstaying its welcome, ideas bursting out all over. 

On Hajime bass bumps around and melodies skitter to and fro as a fragments of vocals flit in and out. Gaslight is slowed down, more voice samples and then an isolated bassline. Beowolf, with a vocal from Dexter Selboy, stutters in from the shadows, Dexter declaring 'I'm fucking Beowolf mate'. By The Palm Tree is led by a funky guitar part, more synth burps and bleeps and a shout of 'hey!', a wonky collision of dancefloor and electronic funk. There is more UK Garage sound on Jetpack and then the loopy, brilliant Little House On The Prairie sampling Laura Ingalls. Dexter Selboy returns to the mic on Daps, followed by Buy Me Flowers, a two minute blast of voice and bass with occasional barrel house piano. Flying Dream finishes with the semi- lucid dream state song Secret Room, an accordion/ synth, tappety tap drum and Samuel singing of finding the secret room in the title. Flying Dream is at Bandcamp. 

On his previous Two Silhouettes album, 2022's Z- Sides, there's a similar range of songs, styles and approaches, thirteen songs/ tracks- Raver is all kick drum and hand claps with a slew of different voices, intoning various rave related phrases- 'raver', 'rinse it', 'I'm raving'- as the synths and keys build. Seriously good. Po' Boys starts out sparse and becomes increasingly hectic and frenetic. I could go on- there are more tracks, ideas, sounds, and samples, with imagination and humour to spare and I genuinely don't think you'll have much in your vast collection of music that sounds much like it. Z-Sides is here. 

Shuffle The Pack

When David Holmes appeared on our album Sounds From The Flightpath Estate it was under the name The Light Brigade. He's using that name again now for a 12" single that's due out at the end of the month, a track that has been kicking around in David's DJ and radio sets for a while. Shuffle The Pack is a collaboration with former Two Lone Swordsman Keith Tenniswood, a fired up and righteous piece of music that sounds like the soundtrack to a protest. 

It starts with applause and crowd sounds and then a voice, 'yeah, it's time for anew course, a new coalition.. got to rise above race, rise above sex... don't cry about what you don't have, use what you got! Our time has come'. The drums kick in, a massive wobbly bassline rides the waves and synths, strings and FX echo and bounce around. Just as you think you're done, that the soundtrack to your own personal revolution is coming to an end and everything's fading out, the voice of Andrew Weatherall appears talking about gnostic ceremony, coloured lights, smoke and acid house as religious ritual. 

Shuffle The Pack is at Bandcamp. The flipside is a track called Only Love Can Save Us, another collaboration, this one with Michael Andrews who worked with David on his Blind On A Galloping Horse album. David was back at NTS last week, another two hour edition of God's Waiting Room with the subtitle Humanity As An Act Of Resistance. AS well as the usual excellent selection of tunes David intersperses the mix with excerpts from TV and radio news concerning the recent hysteria over Kneecap and the ongoing horror show in Gaza and genocide of the Palestinian people who live there- and die there. It's vital stuff, powerful and important. You can listen at NTS. 

Fifty Five

It's my birthday today- I'm fifty five years old. I'm not sure how I feel about fifty five. It is just a number isn't it, another trip around the sun. It's also definitely mid- fifties. Mid- fifties seemed ancient when we were young but it doesn't necessarily feel like that now I'm there. It's nothing to moan about- some people don't get to grow old so we shouldn't grumble about adding another number to our total. Here's some 19th May and fifty five related music to celebrate. 

Malcolm X was born on this day one hundred years ago, 19th May 1925. In the forty five years he was alive he packed in enough for several lifetimes- a tragic childhood, the life of a petty criminal in Boston and subsequent imprisonment, his conversion to Islam while in prison and on release his career as a minister for the Nation Of Islam, his revolutionary politics and speeches, then his departure from NOI and a change in his views and politics, a more conciliatory Malcolm emerging from his pilgrimage to Mecca and visit to Cairo. His assassination on 19th February 1965 robbed the US and the world of an inspirational figure. 

In 1983 Keith LeBlanc released the single No Sell Out, a track credited to Malcolm and using his voice with the permission of Malcolm's widow Betty Shabazz. As a result Malcolm became part of a musical revolution, drum machines and samples and new ways of making records, and given some of the reactions to the single at the time, Malcolm was still capable of pissing people off from beyond the grave. 

No Sell Out

A year later, in 1984, Minutemen release their four sides of vinyl opus Double Nickels On The Dime. The album cover was in response to Sammy Hagar's song I Can't Drive 55, the rocker complaining about a national speed limit of 55 km per hour being imposed on America's roads. The three Minutemen decided that refusing to drive at 55 wasn't being that rebellious. Mike Watt reasoned that 'writing your own songs, coming up with your own story, your own picture, your own book, whatever. So, he can't drive 55 because that was the national speed limit? OK, we'll drive 55 but we'll make crazy music'. 

On the cover Mike is driving his VW Beetle at 55 (double nickels in trucker slang) towards Interstate 10 (the Dime) for the band's hometown San Pedro turn off, the speedometer at 55, Mike winking in the rear view mirror. It took three goes to get the shot right, the photo taken from the back seat by Mike's friend Dick Vandenberg. Double Nickels On The Dime is an inspirational album and Minutemen were an inspirational band, just as much as Malcolm X really- their approach was total DIY punk rock, they created their own world, self taught, the political being the personal. Their song History Lesson Pt. 2 is one of my favourites, a beautiful song about their own history as a band, their lives and friendship and their own inspirations- Bob Dylan, John Doe, Richard Hell, Joe Strummer. 'Punk rock changed our lives', D Boon sings, and finishes with the pay off, ' justme and Mike Watt playing guitar'.

History Lesson Pt. 2

I've just noticed as well when uploading the song that it's the 23rd song on the album- some of you will know about the number 23 and its significance for me.  We went out on Saturday night for some birthday celebrations and ordered some pizza. Guess what number the bleeper we were given to tell us when our food was ready was?

And those lines on it are from this song by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs...

Maps (Live From The Roseland Ballroom)

Forty Five More Minutes Of New Order And Friends

This is a follow up to last Sunday's Your Silent Face mix which veered into their New Order's back catalogue and those of some adjacent artists- Galaxie 500, The Liminanas, Ian McCulloch, Gorillaz, The Times, Mike Garry, Joe Duddell and Andrew Weatherall. This one starts off with another Power, Corruption And Lies song, Age Of Consent, and then heads off with some covers, some 80s NO, another Weatherall remix and some recent edits. 

Forty Five More Minutes Of New Order And Friends

• New Order: Age Of Consent
• Iron And Wine: Love Vigilantes
• Thurston Moore: Leave Me Alone
• New Order: Dreams Never End
• New Order: Lonesome Tonight
• New Order: Regret (Sabres Slow 'N' Lo)
• New Order: Vanishing Point (Rich Lane Edit)
• New Order: Blue Monday (Newly Reordered Remix)

Age Of Consent is the opening song on New Order's 1983 album Power, Corruption And Lies, a day- glo, lysergic rush of guitars, bass, drums and synths, Bernard sounding more comfortable as vocalist. His choppy, rapid Velvets guitar breaks are a joy too. A peak New Order album song. 

As is Love Vigilantes, the opening song on 1985's Low Life, forty years old this month. Bernard's Vietnam ghost story lyric is up there among his most off the wall, and the band, Stephen Morris in particular, are on it, the classic New Order sound perfected. Iron And Wine's 2009 Americana acoustic cover is a low key beauty, Sam Beams tripping the song down to the country that lies at its core. 

Thurston Moore's cover of Leave Me Alone, another Power, Corruption And Lies song, is from the B-side of a 7" single from 2019, recorded in Salford with 'local musicians and local pints', to quote Thurston. 

Dreams Never End is from Movement, the 1981 New Order debut that saw them trying to will themselves out of being Joy Division and into becoming something else. Hooky sings Dreams Never End, his bass and Bernard's guitar wrapping around each other, inching away from the shadow Ian's death cast of them. If a compilation of the band's 10 best album tracks were put together this song would be on it.

Lonesome Tonight was the B-side to Thieves Like Us, a superb 1984 single. Lonesome Tonight is its low key flip, melancholic, stripped down, beautiful, self- produced song that any other band would have given A- side status to and promoted to the world. The band's limitations forced them to experiment, to use their heads and the studio, and Factory put few, if any, demands on them to be commercial. From this they made truly great records. 

Regret was their 1993 comeback single, an indie- pop guitar riff with a singalong chorus. Sabres Of Paradise got to work on it and turned in a pair of epic remixes. Andrew Weatherall's genius is evident in both, especially the first remix- take the bassline, slow it down and find acres of space, loop a little guitar part and a line of vocal, and hey presto, turn New Order's indie- pop into Lee Perry style dub.

Vanishing Point was an album track, another one, that could have been a single, off 1989's era- defining Technique. Rich Lane's edit takes all the best bits, pumps them up and sends it off flying.

There are times when I think I never need to hear Blue Monday again. The band may feel the same. A few years ago Jack Butters, a friend of Rich Lane's, made an entirely unofficial edit that goes all thumpy and acidic, finding a new story inside the song, making it worth hearing all over again. 

Soundtrack Saturday

Alex Cox's 1984 film Repo Man is one of those classic counter- culture 80s films, a combination of road movie, music, Los Angeles, science fiction, UFOs, crime, cars and black comedy and a satire on Reagan's America, 80s consumerism, the nuclear bomb and anything else Alex Cox, in his directorial debut, could throw at the camera. It stars Harry Dean Stanton and Emelio Estevez as repo men- 'the life of a repo man is always intense', says Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). 

The musical backdrop to the film, the scene around which Estevez's character Otto comes from, is 80s L.A. punk. The soundtrack is in part a snapshot of early/ mid 80s L.A. punk rock with the title track coming from Iggy Pop who wrote it specifically for the film after his manager saw a screening of it. 1984 isn't necessarily the best period in Iggy's musical back catalogue. In 1982 he'd released Zombie Birdhouse and the year before Party. Party is poor. Zombie Birdhouse isn't much better. For Repo Man he enlisted ex- Sex Pistol Steve Jones and Blondie's Clem Burke and Nigel Harrison and they make a decent fist of it, the song a heavy piledriver with Iggy in good voice. 

Repo Man

The rest of the songs, ten of them, take in The Plugz (last seen at Bagging Area backing Bob Dylan on David Letterman), Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Fear, Burning Sensations (cvering Jonathan Richman's Pablo Picasso) and Juicy Bananas. As a document of Californian punk rock in Reagan's USA its pretty good. The soundtrack is completed by possibly the most archetypal L.A. punk band of them all, Black Flag, and their 1982 song TV Party. 'We've got nothing better to do/ Than watch TV and have a couple of brews', bawls Henry Rollins. 

TV Party

Battle Weary

Notts duo Coyote entered a purple patch a few years ago and have been putting out one high quality release after another. In the last year there have been two six track albums (2024's Hurry Up And Live and this year's Wailing To The Yellow Dawn) plus several EPs and singe track releases- Habitual Illusions/ Embrace It, Marijuana (with Rolo McGinty of Woodentops fame), Mellow Stone with Florecer, and the dubbed out delight of the Living In Heaven 12". They've also put out a series of Magic Wand edit 12" singles.

Now a new track appears, ahead of a forthcoming single with Peaking Lights. Battle Weary is another trip into reggae for Coyote, a vocal about suffering and uprising from oppression accompanied by shuffly digital dub. It's at Bandcamp and ideal for the sunshine and heat this week has brought us. 

I Love To Watch Things On TV

A few months ago I  committed myself to a dive into Lou Reed's solo album back catalogue, a journey to be undertaken with a bit of caution I've always felt- there is some variability in the quality in his solo career. This was inspired by a post at The Vinyl Villain at the tail end of 2024. He posted the songs from a 1981 Lou Reed Best of called Walk On The Wild Side and I listened to some songs with fresh ears- Wild Child and I Love You from his 1972 solo debut, How Do You Think It Feels from Berlin, Sally Can't Dance and Coney Island Baby, both the title tracks from 1970s albums that I hadn't heard for decades. I decided that where possible I should revisit Lou's solo career in the format it should be heard as far as possible- vinyl (or cassette but I have no functioning cassette player and am not about to buy one). Since then I've done Berlin  back in February (Lou's masterpiece more or less I said) and his solo debut, Lou Reed (a mixed bag, good/ great songs, marred by some strange production and mixing choices). 

I was going to skip Transformer. It felt too obvious. Everyone knows and loves Transformer. If you only have one Lou Reed solo album, it's Transformer. It had a massive 90s resurgence too due to Trainspotting and the BBC. I was going to move onto Sally Can't Dance and/ or Coney Island Baby but to date haven't tracked down second hand vinyl copies at acceptable prices and there's surely a limit to the number of solo Lou Reed albums one person should buy on second hand vinyl in a fairly short period of time. I had both on cassette in the late 80s but those are long gone. I do however own Transformer on vinyl, 1972 vinyl too, bought in the late 80s/ early 90s. Transformer it is then...

Transformer came out in November 1972, just six months after his overcooked solo debut. That album was stacked with songs that dated from Velvets days. Transformer has four songs are from the VU period although the band played them only in demo or live form. The big difference in sound fromt he debut to Transformer is what David Bowie and Mick Ronson bring. Lou's debut had been a commercial disappointment. Bowie, very much a rising superstar in 1972, was a big fan and used his fame and clout to help Lou out. Ronson's playing (guitar, piano, backing vox) and co- production are key to the album's sound. It's glam- ish rock crossed with Lou's New York scuzz and street smarts but beautifully produced- it sounds alive, it's not overloaded or weighed down by too many guitars, there is space and distance between the instruments, it has a great feel. The sleeve art is equally important, a Mick Rock shot, cropped and overexposed with some early 70s street cool on the back- the man's tightly stuffed jeans apparently the result of a banana being stuffed down them for the shoot. Peel slowly and see.

The songs are among Lou's solo best too. Walk On the Wild Side complete with the famous Herbie Flowers bassline is his best known but its matched by others. Vicious is a stunning opening song, the lyric suggested to him by Andy Warhol, Lou being told to write a song about being vicious. 'What kind of vicious?' said Lou. 'Oh, you know, vicious like I hit you with a flower', replied Andy. Meanwhile Ronson's guitar fires off squalls of electricity over Lou's perfect three chord VU trick. 

Vicious

The album rattles by, never outstaying its welcome, songs passing by like NY subway trains. Andy's Chest and Hangin' Round come either side of Perfect Day- a song that enjoyed a huge second life in Trainspotting and then as an all star BBC advert. Separated from all of that now Perfect Day sounds like what it is- classic Lou Reed, minor chords, soft piano, Lou's downbeat, sombre vocal about spending the day in Central Park, drinking sangria and then home. Walk On The Wild Side takes us to the end of side one in under twenty minutes. 

Flip Transformer over and there's the whimsy of Make Up, a celebration of androgyny, cross dressing, gender identity and then Satellite Of Love...

Satellite Of Love

Satellite Of Love has piano, drums, strings, and Lou in romantic mode, serenaded by the backing vocals, wondrous melodies and a sense of awe, Lou/ the narrator watching the launch of a satellite on TV coupled with a change of tone as his feelings of jealousy about his partner being bold with Harry, Mark and John kick in. Bowie's touch is all over it- a magical, cosmic song. 

Wagon Wheel and I'm Set Free add to the fun, Lou sounding unleashed and happy. New York Telephone Conversation is a bit of humour, a slightly bitchy, tongue in cheek novelty. Goodnight Ladies romps us to the end, some oom pa pa to bring the curtain down. Lou would go much further with Berlin, a Weimar descent into squalor and domestic abuse, drugs and violence. On Transformer everything sounds up and more carefree, even the more sombre moments, Bowie and Ronson bringing some light to Lou's shade. It really is one of those albums everyone should own.

Perfect Day (Acoustic Demo)

Calling Out

R.E.M. have released an old/ new EP, a bit unexpectedly maybe. Despite being resolutely still split up the band members' opposition to the Trump government is something that is stirring them into action. One of the many actions of Trump in his first hundred days in office- as well as tanking the global economy and uprooting the global order while destroying any/ all trust in the US internationally, oh and selling Ukraine out while promising to take Canada as a state while turning Gaza into prime real estate while supporting Israel's continued destruction of the Palestinian people and their homes- was to cut all funding to Radio Free Europe, a US backed radio/ media outlet that promotes democracy abroad. RFE may have a checkered history- it was funded by the CIA as part of its Cold War weaponry until 1972 but in recent years it's been seen as a force for good and has been banned by among others Russia and Belarus, neither state being remotely democratic, and it won awards for its coverage of the war in Ukraine. Trump cut the station's funding by Executive Order in March.

R.E.M.'s song Radio Free Europe was their debut single way back in 1981, a song that showed how good they were from the start- raw, fast indie rock, shot through with both something from post- punk and something very southern, Stipe's mumbled words tumbling over Peter Buck's guitars. The very first session R.E.M. had with producer Mitch Easter at his Drive In Studio resulted in three songs- Radio Free Europe, Sitting Still and Wh. Tornado. All three have been released on the new Radio Free Europe EP along with a brand new Jacknife Lee remix of Radio Free Europe and more interestingly, a Mitch Easter remix, unreleased since 1981. The remix, the Radio Free Dub, is a bit of a wonder, an off kilter and sideways version of the song, lots of murky echo and some stuttering FX on the vocal, the guitars and bass submerging and emerging. The five song EP can be bought at R.E.M.'s Bandcamp page, with proceeds going to help fund Radio Free Europe.

The 25th anniversary double CD editions of R.E.M''s albums came with some choice extras- both the Murmur and Reckoning editions had full early 80s live gigs as disc two. The Murmur live show was from Larry's Hideaway, Toronto in 1983, the band in blistering form in a small venue, Mr. Stipe ringing out loud and clear, playing Radio Free Europe thirteen songs into a sixteen song set.

Radio Free Europe (Live at Larry's Hideaway, Toronto 1983)

A year later in Chicago at the Aragon Ballroom they played it early, second song in after opening with their Velvet Underground cover Femme Fatale. 'Put that put that put that up your wall/ That this isn't country at all'.  

Radio Free Europe (Live at the Aragon Ballroom, Chicago 1984)

Shadow Quarter

Mark Peters has made some of my favourite records/ music of the last few years. Back in 2017 he released Innerland, an album of ambient/ instrumental guitar music built on the psychogeography of north west England. It was followed by two more Innerland albums- a fully ambient/ drumless version and a remix album. In 2022 Mark released his second solo album, Red Sunset Dreams- the guitars and synths shifted the landscape from Wigan to the expanse of the grasslands of North America, although I got the feeling that these were prairies of the mind as much as the real ones. Dot Allison sang on two of the tracks including the single Sundowning, a beautiful guitar- led lament which also came with a pair of Richard Norris remixes. In 2023 he put out the EP The Magic Hour which shifted the psychogeographic angle to the Balearics and to Cologne.  

Sundowning was also released as an eight minute live version, Mark backed with a band, recorded at The Band Room, North Yorkshire. All of Mark's solo back catalogue is available here. 

Mark's back with an EP called Shadow Quarter. He's put the guitars aside for most of the eight tracks and moved to piano and keys. The EP opens with Sunset Pulse, an upbeat cosmische piece of music, piano chords, drums and shakers. Motion Code goes further into the West German psyche, throbbing motorik bass and drums and more pianos and keys. Third track Headlight Nocturne is slower, more reflective, a pitter- pattering drum machine, gentle electric piano and washes/ waves of synth. Title track Shadow Quarter goes back to the cosmische with ripples of synth, a slowed down drumbeat and piano topline, sounding like the soundtrack to a journey. 

The second half of the EP is ambient versions of the four tracks, the drums removed and the Eno/ Cluster feel even more to the fore. It's a really engaging EP and highly recommended. You can listen/buy at Bandcamp.

Monday's Long Songs

Escaped From New York is one of two tracks on a recent EP from Belfast's Phil Kieran, a seven and a half minute synth throbber, the sequenced bassline pumping away, drums crashing around and layers of John Carpenter indebted synths, sirens and keys bringing some epic drama. 

Escaped From New York is paired with its seven minute sibling, It's All Gone Wrong, which kicks in at thirty seconds going properly haywire, synths buzzing and fizzing over crunching rhythms. 'It's all gone wrong', the growly voice says, but if this is wrong, who wants to be right? Get the EP at Bandcamp. 

Forty Five Minutes Of New Order- ish

I heard Your Silent Face on Friday night- not for the first time obviously- and it floored me once again. There's something about it that is very special- the rippling Kraftwerk inspired keys and synths, Hooky's bass and the mechanical drumming, Bernard's serious lyrics completely undercut by the 'why don't you piss off line', the way it gloriously skips between euphoria and melancholy. It's much more than all of that, one of those songs that is way more than the sum of the parts. It inspired me to start a New Order mix for my Sunday series but then I changed tack almost immediately. Rather than just sequence of load of my favourite New Order songs (almost all of which would be from the 1980s) I thought it might be more interesting or more fun to do a Your Silent Face/ New Order inspired mix and see where it took me. It took me here...

Forty Five Minutes Of New Order- ish

• New Order: Your Silent Face
• Galaxie 500: Ceremony
• Gorillaz ft. Peter Hook and Georgia: Aries
• The Liminanas and Peter Hook: Garden Of Love
• Ian McCulloch: Faith And Healing
• The Times: Manchester 5.32
• Ride: Last Frontier
• New Order: Isolation
• Mike Garry and Joe Duddell: St. Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H. Wilson (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Your Silent Face opens side two of Power, Corruption And Lies, New Order's second album, released in May 1983. It's now seen as a New Order classic, a landmark album, the fusing of dance and rock, light and shade, a band stepping out of the shadows of Joy Division and the first NO album Movement. Your Silent Face had the working title KW1 (the Kraftwerk one). Funny story about New Order and Kraftwerk- the Dusseldorff robots visited New Order in their Cheetham Hill rehearsal space/ HQ and sat open mouthed as the band showed them the kit they used to make Blue Monday. 'You made that record using... this?' 

Galaxie 500's cover of Ceremony is a beauty, a slowed down, slow burning version, ringing feedback, the guitars gathering in intensity, and Dean's upper register voice smothered in echo. Ceremony was New Order's first single (and in a way, Joy Division's last). It was released as a 12" in 1981, twice, with different sleeves and slightly different versions. Galaxie 500's version came out as a B-side on their Blue Thunder 12" in 1990. At the time the nine year gap between 1981 and 1990 was an eon, the 1981 world and 1990 world two totally different eras- for New Order as much as anyone. 

Gorillaz got Hooky to play bass as part of their Song Machine project in 2020. Aries is I think the best 'New Order' song of the 21st century. Murdoc, Noodles, 2D and Russel Hobbs/ Damon Albarn together with Hooky's bass totally nailed what NO should be sounding like now. 

Four years before Gorillaz got Peter Hook to sling his four string guitar around he hooked up with French duo The Liminanas. Garden Of Love is (again) a great 21st century 'New Order' song, slightly fragile, slightly woozy, psychedelic garage rock, the bassline wending its way to the fore and staying there. 

Ian McCulloch's Faith And Healing is virtually a New Order cover- it sounds so much like a off cut from Technique he probably should have given them writing credits. It came out as a single in 1989, taken from Mac's solo debut Candleland. 

The Times was one of Creation mainstay Ed Ball's projects. In 1990 as The Times he released Manchester as a single, a hymn to a city at the centre of a youth explosion. Hooky's mentioned in the lyrics. It's also a tribute to the sound New Order had on 1985's Lowlife. It couldn't be more Lowlife unless it came wrapped in a tracing paper sleeve. I sometimes it think skirts the line between ridiculous and brilliant. I can imagine it making some people cringe but I think it has charm. Once, driving through France it came on the car stereo on one of the mix CDs I'd burned for the trip and made me briefly, stupidly homesick. I got over it- I mean we were on holiday in France for fuck's sake.  

Last Frontier was on last year's Ride album, Interplay. It's an Andy Bell song, soaring, chiming guitars and on the money drums. It sounds like a close cousin of Regret (the last truly great New Order single, released back in 1993. Although actually, I'm happy to listen to arguments for Crystal, released in August 2001). 

Isolation is a Joy Division song, from their second/ final album Closer. It's a stunning song, the collision of electronic drums and real ones genuinely thrilling, along with the synth and bass. Ian's words are bleak, a man at the end of his tether. This version is by New Order, recorded for a John Peel session in 1998. They still play it live- they did it at Wythenshawe Park last August. 

Mike Garry and Joe Duddell's St. Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H. Wilson is a song I come back to often, Mike's A to Z of Manchester music endlessly listenable and at times very moving. For his remix Andrew Weatherall, a huge fan of Factory, turned the song into a nine minute Weatherall tour de force, complete with a version of the Your Silent Face bassline. Which is where I came in. 

Soundtrack Saturday

In 1986 Julian Temple directed the film version of Absolute Beginners. The book, a 1959 Colin McInnes novel about life in London, race, class, sexuality, fashion, teenagers and jazz, is a post- war British classic, part of a trilogy McInnes wrote about life in London and youth culture. The film is maybe less a classic, more a brave/ doomed attempt. 

It has its charms- at the time of its release I was sixteen and quite taken with Patsy Kensit- and an all star cast- James Fox, Edward Tudor Pole, Sade, Ray Davies, Steven Berkoff and David Bowie- but it was panned on release, seemed more of a marketing exercise than a film and couldn't quite work out what it was trying to do. The two leads, Patsy Kensit and Eddie O'Connell were unknowns and apparently didn't get on. The production company, Goldcrest, had two other major films on at the same time (The Mission starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons and Revolution starring Al Pacino) and Absolute Beginners didn't get the same financial support. Goldcrest went bust not long after. 

The soundtrack however, is a different cup of tea entirely. There's plenty of jazz - Gil Evans, Slim Gaillard, Charles Mingus- along with some 80s London names- Clive Langer, Nick Lowe, Jerry Dammers, Ray Davies- as well as Sade and Smiley Culture. There's also Bowie's stone cold classic single title track, maybe his last truly great single...

Absolute Beginners

Glossy 80s production, sweeping chord changes, the ba- ba- ba- oom backing vocals, and Bowie's lead vocal, a glorious, crooning, soaring thing, ever going upwards, the sound of young love. 

The soundtrack is also home to one of Paul Weller's best Style Council songs. A film about 50s mod made in the 80s was always gong to have Paul turn up somewhere and The Style Council pulled out all their bossanova/ modern jazz/ pop chops for the song.

Have You Ever Had It Blue? (Soundtrack Version)

Underground Deception

A week of mainly new releases reaches a conclusion today with a new EP from Stash Magnetic, a London based duo who promise Electronic Dark Wave Techno Psychedelic. Underground Deception delivers on all of those fronts with an eight minute Moog synth adventure, analogue sounds, rolling rhythms and voices from the netherworld. I'd be tempted to add space/ psyche/ space- goth to the list. 

Friend of this blog Rude Audio turn up on remix duties, a relatively short by Rude Audio standards seven minute excursion, the South London dub styling brought into contact with Stash Magnetic's galaxy bound wanderings. Space dub with a side order of goth- disco in the vocals. I first encountered this remix in Rude Audio's car, driving from Hebden Bridge to Todmorden back in April, just as the sun was going down- the perfect setting for it but my guess is it'll work fine wherever you are right now.  

The third track is Stash Magnetic's own edit- the Panic In The Chillout Room Mix. Panic in the chillout room is something nobody looks forward to. Thankfully the edit goes largely with the chillout rather than the panic, slowing things down and finding some further space in the grooves. A dirty guitar riff crunches its way in, an alien invader looking for somewhere to rest. 

You can hear/ buy Underground Deception at Bandcamp. 

A Mighty Force Indeed

I don't know how Mighty Force manage to keep the quality of their output as high as the quantity of their release schedule but it's good for all for all lovers of electronic music that they do. Mighty Force was originally a label and record shop, based in Exeter from 1990 to 1995, then moving to London until 1999. In 2019, after a twenty year gap, label boss Mark Darby started up again and since then has put out umpteen digital and physical releases including albums by Long Range Desert Group, KAMS, Boxheater Jackson, Golden Donna, Fluffy Inside, David Harrow, Yorkshire Machines, M- Paths, SubDan and Myoptik to name but a few as well as a series of outstanding samplers and compilations. The entire post- 2019 back catalogue is at Bandcamp. Dive in and pick one- you really can't go wrong. 

This year Mark has seen the release of several albums already. In January D3's Acid Love came out, a nine track tribute to the life affirming and regenerative powers of acid techno, an album with huge bass, thumping machine rhythms, acidic toplines, a love letter to 303 and 808 madness. Follow Me opens the album, a  statement of intent. Acid Love is here. 

In March Virgo's Starta Waves saw the light of day. Virgo is Yakasuta Sato- the album is twelve tracks of superb electronic music, a heady combination of acid, techno, ambient and IDM, music created for home listening/ driving/ headphones, a journey into lush synth sounds, drum pads, throbbing bass and dancing acid melodies. Fictional History cuts the tempo and sets the controls for the heart of the somewhere far from here. Track titles Rift In Time, Days Of Exploration and Zoetrope all perfectly match the sounds they were named for. Strata Waves is here. 

The most recent release is brand new this week, an EP of three new tracks and three remixes of Horizontal Rain from Reverb Delay's album from last year, The Storm Has Passed. The trio of remixes all take the original into new dimensions, launched from the same starting point- Reverb Delay's Detroit and Birmingham inspired dub techno- and firing off into other areas. Paddy Thorne's remix raises the bpms and the intensity while colouring everything with beautifully rich synth washes and chords, atmospherics and rhythms together. 

Reverb Delay's Marcus Farley brings a pair of his own remixes, the Parallel Mix and the Ar Right Angles Mix, rapid fire drums and psyched out synths, the latter a ten minute version. The three new tracks are: Sisters & Brothers, Martin Luther King being deployed in a 2025 techno protest against the forces of Trumpism; Escape Pod which sets out tense and dramatic, then finds itself becoming more light and airy, all the while the drums rattling away; and Shadow Dance, a frantic dance into the dark. The Horizontal Rain EP is here. 

The Serpentine

Thurston Moore released a new song last weekend, a brooding, Stooges- ish piece of guitar music that he recorded on May Day 'barefoot in London', all kinds of ominous sounds, the recorded version of heavy skies. The words, written by poet Radieux Radio, do a similar job, making springtime in the Serpentine sound more like a threat than a walk in the park. It's at Bandcamp. 

Thurston Moore released Pollination as a 7" single back in 2020 with a cover of New Order's Leave Me Alone on the B-side. It came with an eight page zine written by Radieux. 

Pollination

Dubtapes

Dubtapes Volume 1 by Klangkollektor came out a year ago on Jason Boardman's Before I Die label. Volume 2 was released last Friday, a four track EP, four more slices of dub space, slo mo drums, echo and piano. All four tracks are superb, the opener Ferry From Torkwrith setting the scene- langourous, beatific Balearic dub from Berlin, music to hide inside, to temporarily block the out the outside world with. Second track Morning Hour is slightly more sunlit, a guitar joining the mix. Starlings sets off with birdsong and the thud of a kick drum, a wave of synth chord and some bass guitar, unhurried and mellow. Fourth track Isle Of Stonsey drifts in, a nine minute excursion into a chilled out version of space, Hawaiian guitar and dub bass prodding us gently into the cosmos. Lovely stuff. It's at Bandcamp, available in digital and vinyl formats. 

Klangkollektor is Lars Fischer, the drummer of Trak Trak, a psychedelic Cumbia band from Berlin. Klangkollektor is a side project that he's been working on for some time, mastered by the legendary Conny Plank. 

Fifty Million Reasons

Shack have got back together after an absence of fifteen years since they last played together (and nineteen since their last album). They played at The Ritz on Friday night. The Head brothers, Mick and John, formed Shack in the late 80s after their first band The Pale Fountains split and recorded some very fine albums- Waterpistol, HMS Fable, The Magical World Of The Strands in the 90s and Here's Tom With The Weather and On The Corner Of Miles And Gil in the 00s. Playing live again the brothers have been joined by bassist Pete Wilkinson and drummer Ian Skelly on loan from The Coral (following the sad death of original drummer Ian Templeton in 2022) plus a duo filling out the sound with horns and flute. 

Shack exist in their own world and space, a band out of time. They seem entirely untouched by 2025, by Tik Tok, Snapchat and Spotify. Their sound- analogue warmth, California in 1967 by way of Liverpool in 1991- is a joy, beautifully crafted songs that ease their way in, songs touched by melancholy and fragility, tales of drug addiction and woe, but also filled with love and joy, the sound of an eternal summer. Mick Head's acoustic guitar and John's semi- acoustic electric mesh together perfectly, wrapping their sounds around each other, with the bass and drums locked in tight, Skelly's drums occupying a space somewhere in between rock and jazz. And then they sing, two voices wracked with over thirty years of living, most of the songs sung by Mick with John taking the lead on three or four. 

They kick off with Sgt. Major from Waterpistol (an album that was nearly lost forever in 1991 following a series of misadventures- a studio fire, tapes left in a taxi). Mick Head between songs seems almost overcome by the occasion, the love and warmth in the room from the crowd to the band and back again. The Ritz was very much a Manchester/ Liverpool event on Friday night, lots of Scousers heading across on the M62 for the gig, the crowd peppered with La's t- shirts. The set ebbs and flows, John and Mick's songs sounding exactly as they should- lived in and loved. Cornish Town (written and sung by John) is a beauty. So is Undecided, one of Mick's best songs, a song for lost summer days, with guitars that cross The Byrds with Fairport Convention, and the line about sticking a needle in your arm jumping out.

Undecided 

It's a dream setlist- Butterfly, Mr. Appointment, the wondrous sea shanty/ folk song Captain's Table, Mick's songbook high point Comedy, a song that cries and laughs- and concludes with the electrifying Streets Of Kenny, Mick's tale of trawling the streets of his home, Kensington (the Liverpool one not the London one), looking for heroin, a sidestep away from Love and into Velvet Underground territory, John shaking his guitar.  

Captain's Table

After a brief disappearance they return for a one song encore, a cover of a song by the band whose DNA runs through Shack more than any other, Love's A House Is Not A Motel. 

Comedy (Radio Edit)

Shack are possibly the cult band's cult band, a band dogged by bad luck and human frailties but loaded with songs. They go largely under the radar and are unknown to most. They lit up The Ritz on Friday night, the set sounding like a celebration. 'When you cry it pulls me through', Mick songs on Comedy, a line echoing down the line from the late 90s, as the Head brothers pluck victory out of the fire.